Some modern applications for reading electronic mail (e-mail) messages are able to group messages into logical conversations. Such conversations are established by grouping together all messages that are replies to one another or to a common root message. The displaying of messages in conversation groupings is supported by various e-mail reading applications such as the OUTLOOK e-mail client from MICROSOFT CORPORATION; the OUTLOOK WEB ACCESS (OWA) e-mail application from MICROSOFT CORPORATION; the ZIMBRA e-mail client from ZIMBRA, INCORPORATED; and the GMAIL e-mail client from GOOGLE, INCORPORATED.
In previous implementations, there generally are two distinct models for conversation based e-mail reading. Some e-mail reading applications provide a list of messages grouped by conversations. A user can select an item from the list to see the contents, or body, of that single selected message in another window or pane of the user interface. Other e-mail reading applications provide a list of conversations, as groups of messages, from which users can choose to view the message contents of all of the messages within a given conversation at once.
The first of the traditional two models for e-mail reading applications generally provides a view of the all conversation messages in a concise list. The second of the traditional two models for e-mail reading applications generally provides all of a conversation's message contents in a single view. However, the display and synchronization of both a message list and a message content view with respect to message conversations is not traditionally supported.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.